Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead (1994) Review

Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead (1994) Review

 

The third entry in the Phantasm series begins with a nifty recap of the first two movies, including that scene from the end of the first one where Mike thinks the Tall Man is coming for him next, and Reggie tells him his brother Jody died in a car wreck. This brings up a good question: is that really how Jody died? He wasn’t in Phantasm II and we didn’t get much explanation or elaboration, so will we find out this time? That question and more will be answered. 

We pick up right where we left off, with the Tall Man commandeering the hearse containing Reggie, Mike, and Liz. Reggie isn’t killed after all, and he’s played again by Reggie Bannister, with Tall Man likewise still played by the same actor, Angus Scrimm. Michael is back to being played by the original actor, A. Michael Baldwin (now fifteen years older) but only for like a second before the car zooms away and blows up in a crash! Reggie blows the head off a zombie dwarf with the quadruple barrel shotgun less than a minute after Mike seemingly dies. What an intro! Don’t worry, Mike survives the crash. Liz, on the other hand, dies. Mike is still hurt, though, and the Tall Man shows up to finally get him, but Reggie threatens the monster with a grenade. Tall Man doesn’t want Mike in pieces, so he lets him go, but takes Liz’s severed head with him.

Soon after we discover the flying chrome balls have tiny little brains in them! I guess that explains their sentience, but how the brains got in there isn’t explained until later. Mike is told to go to the light by a creepy nurse and sees the spirit of Jody, who tells him to keep fighting against the Tall Man’s taunts, then Mike wakes up and fights the nurse, who is clearly an agent of evil. She spews mustard blood, and a chrome ball emerges from inside her skull! A creepy eye probe juts out of it and gets a good look at Mike and Reggie before it leaves without hurting them. So Jody is back! Kind of. Reggie was sure he’s been dead for 10 years, but he’s there in front of them, then Jody’s entire body morphs into a chrome ball and he can communicate with Mike! Tall Man appears and fries the ball and knocks out Reggie and draws in Mike to the other universe. Already Phantasm III is way better than Phantasm II.

Reggie tries to talk to the fried ball that moments ago was Jody, but all he gets out of it is the name of a town, so he heads there in the Barracuda and ends up getting captured by some looters. They try to rob a house but find it’s occupied by creepy dolls and a kid who has the spirit and ingenuity of Kevin McCallister from Home Alone but the viciousness of Jason Voorhees. He kills the woman then throws a Frisbee with razor blades on it at the man and slits his throat, then the last guy falls in a hole and the kid shoots him point blank! Who is this homicidal boy? His name is Tim, and he turns out to be an ally. He lets Reggie out of the trunk and tells him the Tall Man killed his family too and left behind “lurkers” that come out at night. Reggie tries to leave Tim at an orphanage, but Tim hides in the trunk and ends up saving him in a mausoleum guarded by another chrome ball.

Also at this mausoleum are two women who survived the Tall Man’s plague. The ball kills one of them in what has become the classic fashion: drilling into the skull and unleashing a fountain of blood. It’s the same as what we’ve seen before, so it isn’t as shocking as it once was, but it never gets old. Her friend, Rocky, survives and joins them in heading east. Reggie starts hitting on her and takes it a step further when they end up sharing a bed at a hotel, but she tricks him and handcuffs the horny bastard to the bed and leaves him there all night. It’s a pretty funny scene, then the next night Reggie gets lucky, but it’s only in his dream, and Jody interrupts, taking Reggie deep into his own unconscious mind.

They manage to bring Mike back through a portal, there’s a good double callback to the original with Reggie closing the portal and the Tall Man getting his hands cut off, and Reggie quotes Danny Glover from Lethal Weapon: “I'm getting too old for this shit.” A hand turns into a creepy critter just like the severed finger did in the original, and it’s at this point that I realized two things: the pacing of this movie is much better than the previous one, but it's still not as good of a movie as the original overall, because it reuses a lot of the same ideas despite adding in new ones and bringing back the weirdness and surrealism missing from the second. It’s also a bit disappointing having Mike absent from the middle portion, but the third act brings him back into the fold and ups the stakes big time.

We get some gruesome insight into the Tall Man’s process of turning dead bodies into his zombie dwarf army and using the brains for the balls, as well as more great horror moments with Reggie and the others. What does the Tall Man want, exactly? Well, he wants to take over this dimension with an army of zombie dwarves and an armada of chrome balls! The peeling away of the mystery surrounding this villain actually makes him more interesting to me, which isn’t usually the case with horror movie killers, but everything in the first Phantasm is so weird that the clarifications and revelations coupled with the expansions on the lore make it more compelling.

The ending is so crazy I can’t even sum it all up. Mike gets a brain operation from the Tall Man, the looters come back as zombies and menace the others, Tall Man gets speared with a frozen spear and a golden ball explodes out of his head, Reggie fights the golden ball with a plunger, and even though it seems Tall Man has been defeated again, we know it's not over. Mike has been corrupted, Jody speaks in riddles to Reggie before turning back into a ball and flying off, and we get another cliff hanger ending that harkens back to the endings of the first and second movies.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say this is the true Phantasm II because that would denote all the good stuff from the actual second movie, but Phantasm III feels like a better follow up to the original. It still has flaws, but is more consistently entertaining than the previous one and leaves you curious for what will happen next.